by Lee Doty
At some level, she knew that her enemies had altered her mind. The Clerics had said the enemy likely would, it had been part of that big, grumpy briefing they’d given her before the mission. They’d explained some of the biochemistry, told her about some potential effects, and she’d thought she’d understood. The Clerics had spoken in terms of cognitive effects, altered perceptions and reaction times, had told her that she might see things that weren’t there, and that she might enjoy the experience. They’d used, then had to define for her, a fantastic new word, “euphoria”.
However, try as earnestly as they had, the Clerics had not been able to prepare her for the sheer, fantastical awesomeness of this experience!
Having never tasted food, having never felt anything more enjoyable than the pleasant warmth as an exercise burn faded after training or combat, but before the extraction from the Hallow, she was not prepared at all for the flood of defocused ecstasy that she now steeped in. Nothing hurt. In fact, there was this whole other feeling that she could only conceive of as anti-hurt. Just as hot is the opposite of cold, this beautiful sensation all around her was the opposite of pain.
From time to time, her eyes drifted closed and she was lost in a red-tinted wonderland of imagination and sound. Sometimes she saw Crow in these red-tinted hallucinations, sometimes it was almost like he was there. Mostly she saw him in memory, but occasionally he would talk to her as if he were here with her now. This made her sad, partially because she missed him and knew he was probably sitting in the desolation of his dim apartment in that dark and dying world of the future. She wished he could be here now, restrained on his own examination table, with his own fantastic I.V. drips. As pleasant as their time together was, she could only imagine what it would be like if he were here with her in the party prison.
Her eyes fluttered open and she again saw the same round room, different only in the positions of the technicians that worked around her. She could feel water on her face, as if her eyes had been leaking. She realized that she’d been crying. For a hot and wondrous instant, she was both amazed and disappointed: the first time she’d been able to cry and she’d slept through it. It made her want to cry. She giggled at that and the plastic-clad technician nearest to her started, jerking his head toward her and taking a reflexive step back. He seemed to realize with a nearly imperceptible wince that it hadn’t been an evil-pre-murder giggle he’d heard and collected himself somewhat. She gave him a friendly nod and wiggled her fingers at him and he gave her a partial stretch of the lips before turning back to whatever task he’d been doing when she’d so thoughtlessly giggle terrified him.
Time passed. Sometimes she watched the hazmat-suited technicians work, trying to extrapolate their motivations from their inscrutable actions, sometimes she just lay there, fixed like a butterfly on some entomologist’s board, simply feeling the silky air slide in and out of her mouth and nose. Though she exerted some discipline to keep a rough track of the environment around her, she spent a goodly portion of her bleary focus just letting this experience soak into her.
Her reverie was interrupted by a low thrum. She couldn’t raise her head due to her restraints, but was able to shift it slightly to the right so that she could see the large airlock door slide into the wall at the very edge of her vision. Three people strode through the door and the thrum resumed as the heavy door cycled closed again. The three new arrivals were the first people she had seen here who weren’t wearing hazmat suits, so Ash gave them her full attention. The two men walked across the room toward Ash on her table. A third person had turned right, and out of Ash’s field of view. The men stopped in front of Ash, only a few feet away.
One man was tall, dark skinned and solidly muscled beneath an expensive suit just a few shades darker than the color of a shark’s skin. He was an operator. Ash could tell from his bearing, from the sober set of his face, from the hard, intelligent eyes that scanned the room quickly before settling on her. The dark suit had been cut to better conceal a shoulder holster, but Ash could tell that the holster was empty now, and that that fact made the man uncomfortable.
The other man was tall, but still an inch or so shorter than the operator. His look screamed “scientist”. He was dressed in a serious looking lab coat: clean, pressed, and spotless white. Under the professional coat, he wore stylish jeans, comfortable athletic shoes and an ancient and anciently stained T-shirt with some kind of stylized stick figure holding a large rifle on the front. The stick figure and rifle were halfway through a large round door. The scientist was dressed in the contrasts of a man trying to live the dream of a détente between youth and responsibility. He worked out, but for the look, not the strength. His hair was carefully coiffed to appear messy. He looked like someone who would say “Dr. Jones is my father, call me Dr. Chazzy McParty.”
Ash giggled.
The soldier in spook finery divined the target of Ash’s giggle and favored her with a quick smile that transformed his face from that of a simple threat to be overcome, and into a person like her or Crow or any other teammate. His grin spread as he glanced to the side at Dr. McParty, who was fidgeting a bit, looking from Ash to the soldier.
Ash couldn’t help it. She said it: “Dr. Chazzy McParty, I presume?” It was probably the drugs.
The presumed doctor frowned. The presumed operator’s smile widened. “And you must be Dirk Stone, agent of the OSI,” Ash pronounced, “Come to see who’s been killing your agents and frustrating your evil plans.”
The operator’s brow quirked upward in a casual surprise, “You sure she hasn’t said anything yet?” he said, looking over Ash’s right shoulder.
“Not a word… Dirk.” A woman’s voice responded from behind Ash, a smile colored the words. “I’m as surprised as you.” Ash heard the click of buttons behind her and a motor engaged in the table and further inclined her forward until she was almost fully upright.
“Is that more comfortable?” The woman behind Ash asked. Ash said nothing.
The operator shook his head, a small smile still on his face. “Evil plans?” he snorted, “I never could get the hang of those, never could figure when I was supposed to be monologging, never could contrive the creatively ineffective ways of disposing of the hero of the story. Then, it occurred to me that just because mom named me Snively doesn’t mean I have to start waxing my moustache and tying Polly to the train tracks.”
Ash smiled, she was going to have to get serious soon, but in a minute. “Underdog.” She said, laughing.
“See?” the operator gave McParty a sidelong glance, “And you said I couldn’t get any information from our guest. She’s into the cartoons. She even knows the ancient ones.”
“Enh.” Ash slurred, “They’re all ancient from my perspective.”
The operator’s brow furrowed slightly before he caught the expression and smoothed his face back to a friendly neutral.
McParty’s eyelids twitched up with inspiration, “You’re not by chance from the future, are you? Because if so, Dirk here owes me twenty bucks.”
“The future,” Ash mused groggily. She thought of Crow in his little dank apartment, thought of Tink in his wheelchair, Shadow eating tasteless food with a desolate look in his eye. The drugs burning through her seemed to do an abrupt judo throw on her levity and she crashed into sadness with no warning. A small sob escaped her lips and she wept like she’d never wept before, which was literally true. Tears blurred her vision and streaked her cheeks, she seemed to be enfolded in the experience so entirely that for a time she forgot where she was. She tried to wipe the tears from her eyes, but her arms were held fast, tried to pull her knees up and fold into herself, but she was held motionless on the table.
“Careful…” the woman’s voice behind Ash said. The words had been gently reproachful, but carried an undercurrent of quiet authority. Ash opened her tear-blurry eyes and saw the soldier with his hand on McParty’s shoulder, gently restraining him. From her nearly vertical vantage point, Ash saw the red circle on the
floor for the first time. Its radius was about two yards and she was at its center. McParty had taken a step into the circle with a look of concern on his face but had stopped, looking uncertain.
“We need to adjust the push…” McParty said uncertainly.
“You need to do that from inside the circle?” the woman who had been behind Ash said, walking the circle’s circumference toward the other two. “Because I’m reasonably sure you’ve got those kinds of controls on the tablet in your left hand.”
McParty stepped back outside the circle reluctantly, nodding acknowledgement and raising the tablet. He began to prod the device with the quick efficiency of long practice. The woman reached the other two and turned to Ash. Ash’s eyes widened slightly then narrowed. She attributed the visible reaction to the drugs still coursing through her, but she at least kept the smile off of her face.
The woman was ageless. With short spiky gray hair, buttoned down black pantsuit and no discernible makeup, she struck Ash as a matronly CEO, rather than the primary cause of the end of the world. Ash breathed in and held that breath, closing her eyes as she sorted her thoughts, distanced herself from the joy they were pumping into her veins, and felt the world snap into focus. Mental defenses fully engaged, she opened her eyes again.
***
The dragon’s eyes opened. Tears still streaked her face, but the eyes belied a new clarity. Though there was nothing she could put her finger on, Smith knew that something important had just happened. The raw misery that had taken the dragon so completely a moment before had been subdued seemingly by an act of will—an act of will that the pacifying drugs they were pumping into her should have made impossible. That wasn’t it though, or at least not all of it. Something else had just happened, something that Smith’s instincts were screaming was critically important.
Smith stared at the dragon for moment, a confused alarm seeming to swell from her guts into chest, then throat. Before her, the agonized child had closed her eyes and a monster had opened them. Not a monster full of malice, but a focused blankness that Smith instinctively knew was far more dangerous. It was not a demon’s fiery glare that regarded her, but the precisely machined hollow of a gun’s barrel. The alarm within continued to rise, up through Smith’s neck, flushing warm across her face, then finally it settled in her mind, bringing a primitive understanding at last: the hollow barrels of the dragon’s eyes were locked on her. This is what it felt like to be prey.
Hawkins had noticed the change in their captive as well. While Smith stiffened trying to get the fear out of the way so that she could think, Hawkins loosened his stance slightly, center of mass shifting down a few inches as he bent his knees and transferred more weight to the balls of his feet, his right hand ticking abortively toward his empty holster at his left shoulder.
Nelson finished adjusting the dragon’s target sedative level on his tablet and looked up, “Okay, it will take a while to make a difference, but she should be more balanced soon…” He trailed off, eyes shifting between the dragon and Smith. “What?” he said, noticing the new tension in the air for the first time.
The dragon shifted her eyes about the room, casually across both her restrained arms and down across her restrained body before raising them again to meet Smith’s eyes. “You are not going to get away with it.” The dragon said flatly.
Smith’s mouth went dry under that blank stare. Logic told her that she was in no danger, but something about the dragon’s stare bypassed logic and seemed to wind itself directly around her brainstem. “Get away with what?” Smith said when she was sure that her voice wouldn’t shake.
“Killing the world.” The dragon said.
There was a sound like a strained rope snapping and things happened so fast that there wasn’t time for any thought. It was hard for Smith to admit later, but she lost her composure a bit, just for a second, but it was enough for a small cry to escape her throat. Nelson never did admit later—not even when confronted with video logs from several angles—that by far the loudest and most girly squeak had been his.
The dragon moved. Though she was held at wrists, elbows, neck, knees and ankles, still she moved. With the sound of ropes snapping, she dislocated the thumb on her right hand and her right shoulder, jerking the shoulder forward and across her body, ripping the hand with the dislocated thumb through the strap at her wrist. As the arm moved, the I.V. in her right forearm was torn out as the arm passed through the strap that had been holding her elbow. The dragon threw her elbow forward as it cleared the strap, allowing the hand to also clear the strap that had been holding her elbow, her dislocated shoulder folding forward across her body in a move that shouldn’t have been possible.
Smith and her two companions took an involuntary half step back, each trying to orient to the new situation. The dragon threw her right hand out hard to the side with another wet bursting sound as the shoulder and thumb snapped back into alignment. The dragon’s free hand flipped back left, plucking the I.V. tube from her left arm, then flew to the heavy hook and loop closure on the bond at her left wrist.
Hawkins broke his freeze first. “Move!” he shouted, throwing an elbow strike cross body and surging forward. The strike and word were part of a training regimen he’d begun as a part of combat training nearly two decades ago, essentially trying to break the OODA loop and turn a cognitive freeze into quick action. Every person freezes when faced with a violent or surprising situation, no matter their level of training or experience. This freeze is caused by the brain trying to Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act (OODA) in relation to the unexpected stimulus. This cognitive loop is what gets a lot of people killed in an ambush. The way Hawkins had been trained to deal with this as a young soldier was to shout “move” and perform a high-percentage close quarters attack (the elbow cross) in order to break this loop and get back into the timing of reflexes and instinct. The other counter he’d been trained to use was to shout “Down” and drop to the ground… in the strange elongated timescape of surprise and adrenaline, he mused that his subconscious had made the right call here, as dropping to the ground would likely have just gotten him kicked to death after the dragon finished tearing herself free of her restraints.
Moving at last, freed from the prison of conscious thought, Hawkins rode his reflexes forward, praying that he could neutralize the dragon while she was still partially held. He outweighed her by maybe seventy pounds of muscle and had been training for over half his life to use that muscle in situations like this, but he’d seen enough video of her to understand that catching her partially immobilized and still high as a kite would be his only chance.
***
Ash moved, ignoring the pain that screamed at her from her damaged shoulder and thumb. She fully experienced the pain, as it gave her information about the damage to her body, but the pain did not own her. Instead it slipped by like the view of a long road outside a speeding car. She saw the pain dispassionately and clearly, felt it deeply and accurately, but it never disoriented her, never overwhelmed her with the experience.
She had the restraint off her left hand before the soldier reached her. His jumping thrust kick at her head was a particularly effective move, as the straps around her head and throat were both still in place, making her head a stationary target. Though her left arm was still held at the elbow, Ash brought her right arm across her face, pulling on the restraint with her bent left elbow to make up for the fact that her legs and waist were still held. Her right elbow and her forearm deflected the soldier’s kick into the table’s padding an inch from her left cheek. The table was obviously permanently fixed to the floor, as the kick’s force didn’t move the table, but Ash could feel its power dissipating though a shocking jolt in the nearly vertical table behind her. Ash’s right hand continued left, tearing away the hook and loop restraint at her left elbow.
The soldier pulled his leg back before Ash could wrap it with her newly freed left arm. He bounced back from the table, shifted his balance forward and left and drove his knee
into Ash’s solar plexus. Her waist and head were still secured, so she couldn’t dodge out of the way. She’d gotten her right hand on the approaching leg, but when she’d tried to pull the knee to the side, her damaged shoulder screamed and dislocated again. That avalanche of pain struck at nearly the same time as the knee to her chest. Her vision flashed, her heart lurched, two ribs broke, she used her left hand to free her neck and she managed to writhe left and forward enough to slip out of the strap around her forehead before his leg was again on the floor.
The soldier’s left elbow crashed toward her as the knee that had hit her dropped to the floor and became the seed from which a brutally efficient twisting cross-body elbow strike grew. Ash threw her right arm and shoulder up but, as the howling pain from her still re-dislocated shoulder had warned, the move was slow and weak. She managed to duck her head left, but the right arm didn’t do much more than take the hit, transferring most of the energy into her head. The impact also further damaged the tendons and ligaments around the dislocated shoulder.
Ash threw her right hand out parallel to the table she was still partially strapped to and rolled the shoulder in a single motion that drove the shoulder back into alignment with another pop. At the same time, her left hand streaked out in a straight-fingered strike at the soldier’s eyes. He managed to slip the blow, but it gave Ash time to release the restraint that secured her waist. As the soldier dodged back in, Ash bent and tore open the restraints at her left knee and ankle, then rose in a single fluid motion for a rising palm strike to the tip of the soldier’s chin. His knees buckled and he staggered back a step, but didn’t fall to the floor. Ash swung down to release the final two restraints on her right leg, noticing with satisfaction that her target was still standing, frozen less than two yards from her. Well, if the world needs saving, she thought in the joy of speed and purpose, she was the one for the job.
